The Pirate Bay says it has been offered virtual asylum in North Korea. The move comes after the Norwegian Pirate Party was forced to stop routing traffic for the infamous BitTorrent site by a local copyright group. "We can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the Republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network," the Pirate Bay says. A traceroute indeed suggests that The Pirate Bay is now being routed through the dictatorial country.

Last week the Swedish Pirate Party was forced to shut down its routing services to The Pirate Bay.

The Party and its leaders took this difficult decision after they were threatened with a lawsuit by a local anti-piracy group.

Luckily for The Pirate Bay, the pirate parties of Norway and Catalunya were willing to take over the role. However, after just a few days the Norwegians had to shut down their Pirate Bay node as well, facing similar threats as their Swedish comrades.

This resulted in some downtime earlier today after which The Pirate Bay returned online from a rather unexpected location.

A Pirate Bay insider informs TorrentFreak that they had been working for a while to get connectivity in North Korea. Today they made the big switch.

“We’ve been in talks with them for about two weeks, since they opened access for foreigners to use 3G in the country,” a Pirate Bay insider told us. “TPB has been invited just like Eric Schmidt and Dennis Rodman. We’ve declined up until now.”

While The Pirate Bay may not visit North Korea, they announce that they are using the country’s network to connect the BitTorrent site to the rest of the world.

“This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high.”

“At the same time, companies from that country are chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information,” they add.

The Pirate Bay says that it sees the current step as one forward for North Korea, and the BitTorrent site hopes that all North Koreans can soon access the site to foster freedom of information.

“We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country’s changing view of access to information. It’s a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond.”

“We will do our best to influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service, and to make sure that we can help improve the situation in any way we can. When someone is reaching out to make things better, it’s also ones duty to grab their hand,” TPB concludes.

It’s worth noting that the Korean connection is used to hide Pirate Bay’s true location. The cloud servers behind it are still believed to be hosted elsewhere in the world.

While it’s hard to believe everything The Pirate Bay says, the site does indeed route through a North Korean netblock at the moment. Whether it is sanctioned by the authorities, or if there is perhaps some hacking and hijacking trickery involved is a “mystery”. Keep in mind that the Pirate Bay is known for its satire.

In either case, Hollywood and the major music labels will have a hard time shutting that node down.

Update: The Pirate Bay admits on Facebook, as expected, that it was a hack for the lulz.

“We hope that yesterdays little hack proved that we know the internet better than our enemies. Since about 40% of the entire internets traffic consists of torrents enabled by us, you can almost say that we ARE the internets. Fuck with the internets and we’ll ridicule you (points at MAFIAA with a retractable baton) until you beg for mercy.”

“We’ve hopefully made clear (once again) that we don’t run TPB to make money. A profit hungry idiot (points at MAFIAA with a retractable baton) doesn’t tell the world that they have partnered with the most hated dictatorship in the world. We can play that stunt though, cause we’re still only in it for the fuckin lulz and it doesn’t matter to us if thousands of users disband the ship.”

“We’ve also learned that many of you need to be more critical. Even towards us. You can’t seriously cheer the “fact” that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea. Applauds to you who told us to fuck off. Always stay critical. Towards everyone!”

Update: The Norwegian Pirate Party told TorrentFreak that they never routed any traffic. They just put their name on the node. The Telecom company Availo pulled the plug, allegedly after being contacted by copyright holders.